Still no outrage over wars in Iraq, Afghanistan

Published 8:00 pm, Sunday, October 11, 2009

By JULES WITCOVER

WASHINGTON -- As the war in Afghanistan has reached its eighth anniversary and comparisons with the Vietnam quagmire grow, the relative public acquiescence in it continues.

Even as President Obama holds marathon high-level meetings over the future dimensions of the fight triggered by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Americans generally still accept quietly the human and financial toll.

Last week, when anti-war protesters descended on the nation's capital to reawaken the American conscience against the two wars that have helped cripple the economy and thousands of families, they caused barely a ripple.

This was so despite an unusually extensive word-and-picture story on page one of the Washington Post that chronicled the planning and execution of the protest. The organizers in advance ran drills in non-violence that included mock waterboarding and lessons on how to chain oneself to the fence around the White House.

When the actual protest took place last Monday and the participants marched silently past the White House, 15 of them wearing orange jumpsuits of the sort worn by detainees at Guantanamo actually did chain themselves to the fence. Local police moved in with wire cutters, cut them loose, loaded them in a bus and hauled them off to jail.

In all, 62 protesters were arrested and 23 "forcibly removed" of the total of 176 counted by the Post who had gathered for the demonstration. Included was Cindy Sheehan, the Iraq War gold-star mother still raising the cry since her heavily publicized sit-in near the George W. Bush ranch at Crawford, Texas, in the heyday of the now-tepid effort.

The Washington police and Secret Service, inured to the protests by now, kept a watchful eye, doing nothing to cast the demonstrators in a particularly sympathetic light to onlookers who mostly went about their business.

Afterward, their leaders moved on to other cities including New York, Chicago, Austin and San Francisco later in the week, with hopes eternally high but turnouts and publicity low.

The attempt to stir the consciences of the White House war planners and the general populace fell far short even of previous Washington demonstrations that as recently as two years ago had filled downtown streets. Then, banners were waved expressing defiance of Bush for everything from the war to the neglect of hurricane-ravaged New Orleans.

Those marches themselves paled in comparison with the huge outpourings in the late 1960s and early 1970s against the Vietnam war, whose commanders-in-chief, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, brought the protest to a fever pitch against them personally as well.

The obvious differences then were the military draft and the death count of 58,000 Americans in Vietnam. Together, they brought that war home in ways not yet experienced in the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not, that is, except for the thousands of Americans who have made the supreme sacrifice there, and their families.

Also, President Obama as an early critic of the Iraq war has so far largely escaped the wrath and venom of most of the anti-war movement. Since the election, however, he has disappointed both the active protesters and many liberal Democrats for not moving faster in withdrawing from Iraq.

Now, as he reassesses the continuing mission in Afghanistan, the haven of the 9/11 perpetrators, they watch and worry that he may in the end raise the U.S. troop level there, thereby signaling no major shift from the stay-the-course Bush policy. But they do so without the public outrage that helped end that other fiasco in Vietnam of three decades ago.

The latest polls have indicated 51 percent of Americans surveyed now think the war in Afghanistan, like the one in Iraq, is not worth fighting. Still, the protest against it remains a largely muffled one, lacking the political clout that marked the end of the American involvement in Vietnam, as unsatisfactory as that end was.

Obama's argument now that the war in Afghanistan remains one of "necessity" to combat the al-Qaida threat makes the protest against it a much harder sell. And that contention is his best bet to retain political support for pressing on militarily there.